Blender Cycles: Lighting and Rendering Cookbook

Cookbook

Bernardo IraciDecember 2013

If you’re already au fait with Blender, this book gives extra power to your artist’s elbow with a fantastic grounding in Cycles. Packed with tips and recipes, it makes light work of the toughest concepts.

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Book Details

ISBN 139781782164609

Paperback274 pages

About This Book

Get acquainted with the lighting and rendering concepts of the Blender Cycles engine

Learn the concepts behind nodes shader system and get the best out of Cycles in any situation

Packed with illustrations and a lot of tips and tricks to make your scenes come to life

Who This Book Is For

If you are a digital artist who already knows your way around Blender, and you want to learn about the new Cycles’ rendering engine, this is the book for you. Even experts will be able to pick up new tips and tricks to make the most of the rendering capabilities of Cycles.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Key Holder and Wallet Studio Shot

Introduction

Setting up Cycles for the first run

Creating a three-point light setup in Cycles using mesh emitters

Learning environment lighting

Using the Glossy shader to create a clean metal material

Adding realism to the keys with a bump texture

Creating a rubber shader for the key holder

Adding color to the key holder

Creating a leather material for the wallet

Using the Cycles camera's depth of field

Setting the Cycles render parameters

Chapter 2: Creating Different Glass Materials in Cycles

Introduction

Creating a simple glass shader

Creating a glass full of water

Using default Cycles caustics

Creating custom fake caustics

Creating a custom and more versatile glass shader

Creating more complex glass materials

Obtaining a dispersion effect

Creating an absorption glass shader

Chapter 3: Creating an Interior Scene

Introduction

Creating fake portals to decrease the noise in the scene

Creating a parquet material

Creating materials for the plant in the scene

Creating a different kind of leather

Creating the materials for the lamp

Creating a carpet using hair particles

Setting up night lighting

Using IES files in Cycles

Chapter 4: Creating an Exterior Scene

Introduction

Setting up the lighting with an external plugin

Creating the road material

Creating the grass material

Texturing the tree trunk and creating realistic leaves

Adding flowers to the scene

Creating the wood material for the table and the fence

Giving final touches to the image using render passes

Chapter 5: Creating a Cartoonish Scene

Introduction

Setting up the environment and lighting

Creating skin, teeth, and other body parts

Creating the hair material

Creating the dress material

Compositing the scene

Chapter 6: Creating a Toy Movie Scene

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating a realistic plastic material for the characters

Creating the environment

Achieving a movie look using the compositor

Chapter 7: Car Rendering in Cycles

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating the car paint material

Creating the material for the tyres and the rims

Creating the material for headlights and other details

Compositing the scene

Chapter 8: Creating a Car Animation

Introduction

Setting up the lighting

Creating a car paint material

Creating the materials for the exterior environment

Setting up the scene for the animation

Compositing the scene

Chapter 9: Creating an Iceberg Scene

Introduction

Creating the ice and snow materials

Creating the sea material in Cycles

Compositing the scene

Chapter 10: Creating Food Materials in Cycles

Introduction

Creating grapes in Cycles

Creating parmigiano cheese

Creating bread

Learning the Branched Path Tracing render

What You Will Learn

Understand how to use the node editor

Learn to create your first material in Cycles

Light a scene in Cycles

Deal with animations in Cycles

Design complex shaders and lighting setups

Get the best out of your renders thanks to Cycles render passes

Create complex realistic shaders using advanced techniques

In Detail

Blender provides a broad spectrum of modeling, texturing, lighting, animation and video post-processing functionality in one package. It provides cross-platform interoperability, extensibility and a tightly integrated workflow. Blender is one of the most popular Open Source 3D graphics applications in the world.

Modern GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) have some limitations for rendering complex scenes. This is mainly because of limited memory, and interactivity issues when the same graphics card is also used for displaying and rendering frames. This is where Cycles rendering engine comes into play. Cycles is bundled as an add-on with Blender. Some of the features of Cycles is its quality, speed and having integrated industry standard libraries.

This book will show you how to carry out your first steps in Cycles - a brand new rendering engine for Blender. In a gradual and logical way, you will learn how to create complex shaders and lighting setups to face any kind of situation that you may find in Computer Graphics.

This book provides information on how to setup your first application in Cycles. You will start by adding lights, materials, and textures to your scene. When it’s time for the final render, you will see how to setup Cycles in the best way. You will learn about a wide variety of materials, lighting, techniques, tips, and tricks to get the best out of Cycles. Further on in the book, you will get to know about animation and still shots, and learn how to create advanced materials for realistic rendering, as well cartoon style shaders.

This cookbook contains a wide range of different scenes, proposed in a structured and progressive order. During this journey, you will get involved in the concepts behind every step you take in order to really master what you learn.

Authors

Bernardo Iraci

Bernardo Iraci was born in Livorno, Italy in 1985. He followed a standard education career until he graduated in Economics in 2009. He always had a great passion for computers, especially gaming. During the latter part of his studies, he also developed a passion for 3D graphics, and this soon became the main focus of his career. It was at this time that he came to understand that his passion was the most important thing to pursue, more important than even attending university.

Even though Bernardo later participated in various online courses teaching the different aspects of computer graphics, he has been largely self-taught. In 2010, he moved to Warsaw, Poland, where he was finally able to start working full-time in computer graphics as a 3D generalist in the field of movies VFX and advertisments. He also started work as a freelancer.

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